622 PSTCHOLOGt. 



After all we have said, uo commeut seems called for 

 upou these iuterestiug and important facts and reflections 

 of Helmholtz. 



ments, as to the analysis of aggregate feeliugs into elementary feelings sup 

 posed to have been hidden in them all the while. 



The reader can himself apply this criticism to the following passages from 

 Lotze and Stumpf respectively, which 1 quote because they are the ablest 

 expressions of the view opposed to my own. Both authors, it seems to me, 

 commit the psychologist's fallacy, and allow their later knowledge of the 

 things felt to be foisted into their account of the primitive way of feeling 

 them. 



Lotze says: "It is indubitable that the simultaneous assault of a 

 variety of different stimuli on different senses, or even on the same sense, 

 puts us into a state of confused general feeling in which w^e are certainly 

 not conscious of clearly distinguishing the different impressions. Still it 

 does not follow that in such a case we have a positive perception of an 

 actual unity of the contents of our ideas, arising from their mixture ; our 

 state of mind seems rather to consist in (1) the consciousness of our inabil- 

 ity to separate what really has remained diverse, and (2) in the general 

 feeling of the disturbance produced in the economy of our body by the 

 simultaneous assault of the stimuli. . . , Not that the sensation.s melt into 

 one another, but simply that the act of distinguishing them is absent; and 

 this again certainly not so far that the fact of the difference remains 

 entirely unperceived, but only so far as to prevent us from determining the 

 amount of the difference, and from apprehending other relations between 

 the different impressions. Anyone who is annoyed at one and the same 

 time by glowing heat, dazzling light, deafening noise, and an offensive 

 smell, will certainly not fuse these disparate sens.itions into a single one 

 with a single content which could be sensuously perceived ; they remain 

 for him in separation, and he merely finds it impossible to be conscious of 

 one of them apart from the others. But, further, he will have a feeling of 

 discomfort — what I mentioned above as the second constituent of his whole 

 state. For every stimulus which produces in consciousness a definite con- 

 tent of sensation is also a definite degree of disturbance, and therefore 

 makes a call upon the forces of the nerves ; and the sum of these little 

 changes, which in their character as disturbances are not so diverse as the 

 contents of consciousness they give rise to, produce the general feeling 

 which, added to the inability to distinguish deludes us into the belief in 

 an actual absence of diversity in our sensations. It is only in some such 

 way as this, again that I can imagine that state which is sometimes de- 

 scribed as the beginning of our whole education, a state which in itself is 

 supposed to be simple, and to be afterwards divided into different sensa- 

 tions by an activity of separation. No activity of separation in the world 

 could establish differences where no real diversity existed ; for it would 

 have nothinLT to guide it to the places where it was to establish them, or to 

 indicate the width it was to give them.' (Metaphysic. §260, English trans- 

 lation.) 



Stumpf writes as follows : " Of coexistent sensations there are al 



